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It doesn't make sense to me that a police officer could be illiterate, or a doctor be afraid of blood... You'd be hard-pressed to find an obese lumberjack. That is to say, some traits are incongruous with some occupations. Frankly, there aren't many traits which DO clash like this, and most of the occupations work pretty well with all traits, but some don't seem to work at all. This is sort of already present, with how some occupations automatically add a trait which is mutually exclusive with another (Veterans can't be cowardly for instance). This WOULD only remove the ability to add negative traits (as far as I can tell) but this wouldn't be a benefit, as it could make the player pick negative traits they would have avoided otherwise, or multiple traits instead of one bad one, if they wanted to pick a powerful occupation AND have a number of good traits along with it.

As hard as it is to imagine growing old in the Zombie apocalypse, I'd still like to suggest 2 things for very long running games. 1- 2 new traits and 2 negative trait: Child [Costs 2 trait points] Pros: +3 Fitness, maximum of 13 Fitness, can run and fight for longer before getting tired, increased XP gains for crafting skills Cons: -2 Strength, Maximum of 8 Strength, increased fall damage, receives increased knock back and knock down damages, receives increased panic levels Your body is smaller and so you get hurt more due to falling. You also have smaller muscles, which means your natural strength and maximum strength are smaller than an adult, but you can run for longer without being tired naturally due to having more natural energy. Start the game with "8 years old", ends at "13 years old". Teenager [Costs 1 trait points] Pros: +1 Fitness, maximum of 11 Fitness, increased XP gains for crafting skills Cons: -1 Strength, maximum of 9 Strength, receives increased stress and panic levels Your body already started to become the size of a normal adult and your muscles are developping. You can already resist being pushed back, but your hormones make you more unstable and you are starting to lose the excessive energy of being a child. Start the game with "14 years old", ends at "19 years old". Old [Gets 6 trait points] Pros: Get a considerable amount of trait points Cons: -1 Strength and fitness, maximum of 9 strength and fitness, gets tired faster You are just starting to feel the effects of age and your body isn't what it once was. You can still be somewhat active, but you know your body will start degrading from now on. Start the game with "65 years old" ends at "79 years old" Elder [Gets 12 trait points] Pros: Get a HUGE amount of trait point Cons: -3 Strength and fitness, maximum of 7 Strength and fitness, take increased damage in general, gets tired faster, has a small % chance of getting sick suddenly that grows a little every year. Your body is already starting to degrade and you can't really be fully active anymore. You know you will probably die naturally some time in the years to come even if the zombies don't get to you. Start the game with "80 years old" ends at "death" 2- Aging system: The idea here is very simplistic, on character creation you'd pick your character's age while choosing your traits, depending on your age, it would give you one of the above traits. If you are between 20 to 64 years old you just get no age related trait and are simply an adult. You'd just age 1 year per in-game year and the same would happen to NPCs, getting the appropriate age related trait if and when you get to that age. When you become a certain age, you lose the trait effects of the previous age group and gain the ones of the new one. So the moment you go from being a child to being a teenager, you'd gain 1 strength, lose 2 fitness and your maximum strength and fitness would be adjusted. Same when you become old or an elder. NPCs would also need to be able to have babies that grow into young children and then become a proper "child" NPC after reaching 8 in-game years which would close the cycle of seeing NPCs being born and age until dying. Ages younger than 8 years old would be exclusive to NPCs, either on world creation as part of a "family", as mentioned in another post I made about NPC, or born in a base as a baby and growing. This would be something hard to see happen besides choosing your age on character creation, but for a very long running game, it would be EXTREMELY interesting to see that the world is actually alive and your character isn't an ageless immortal. This also brings important issues, such as, if your base's doctor is an elder NPC, if that NPC dies due to age, your base will be out of a doctor, so you better get a younger NPC trained as a doctor before the old one dies.

I posted this suggestion on the Steam suggestions as well, but thought I maybe should share it here as well. There are three things I'd like to say about the Smoker negative trait. 1- It should be possible to plant Tobacco, dry it, treat it and craft your own cigarettes. There should also be "smoking paper" and "cigar filters" which should also be a craftable out of wood with specific tools for it and cotton(which should also be farmable), respectively. In a big base very late game or even in a server with friends, those are things that are needed for there to be a production of cigarettes instead of relying on finding cigarettes in the world. Imagine a game with 20 people all 20 having the smoker negative trait. The number of cigarettes per day will be pretty high and just finding them in the world by scavenging will not be enough for their characters needs, but they could have a tobacco farm and produce cigarettes in high amounts. 2- Smoking should have negative effects on your character as well and not just be about having to smoke and finding cigarettes in the world. There should be a hidden counter of how many cigarettes your character has smoked and for how many days they have been a smoker. After a while of smoking, a few weeks to a few months or after a certain number of cigarettes, there should be a % chance that you character develops a temporary version of the "asthmatic" trait after every cigarettes they smoke. After a year, there should be a small chance they develop it permanently. After 2 years there should be a chance to develop a temporary "out of shape" after every cigarettes. After 3 years a chance to develop it permanently. After 5 years a chance do develop a permanent version of "prone to illness" and after 10 years a % chance to develop a sickness that doesn't go away, may randomly cause "pain" status and can grow until it kills your character (cancer). This percentage chance should start low but grow a tiny little bit every in-game year after that. 3- It should be possible to lose the "smoker" trait by not smoking for over 1 year in-game and dealing with the stress and negative effects of trying to not smoke. There should be an invisible counter of how many days your character has not smoked. After a few days, you would develop a temporary "Hearty Eater" that comes and goes every few days. Then after a while a temporary "Restless Sleeper" that lasts until close to the end of that 1 year period. After a few more days, develop "Sleepyhead" as well. So your character is stress eating, resting little and feeling tired all the time. You should also randomly receive high amounts of stress. And sometimes receive a temporary "High Thirst". If you already had any of these negative traits, it should temporarily increase their effects. After that one year period has ended, you'd have lost these temporary versions of the negative traits and lose the "smoker" negative trait. If you smoke a cigarette, you'd also lose the temporary version, but reset the marker back to 0. If at any moment your character smoke a single cigarette after losing the smoker trait, they should immediately receive the smoker trait back again. Even without the smoker trait, there should be a random low % possibility of your character receiving the first stage of stress due to the smoker trait which the percentage shrinks lower every passing year until it reaches 0% after several years. The permanent negative traits you gained due to smoking in suggestion 2 should also be lost gradually every few years after your character stops smoking. (With the exception of the sickness) It only uses mechanics already present in the game, is much more realistic to the effects of cigarettes (coming from someone who smoked for years and has stopped for over 10 years) and doesn't rely solely on scavenging for cigarettes. Smoking in the game is currently not much more than a small scavenging hassle when it should have long-term issues to that short-term bonus 4 points. Both keeping smoking and stopping to smoke should be a hassle, if you keep smoking you get long-term issues, if you stop smoking you get one very bad in-game year. This not only make the smoker trait something you really have to think about but portrays cigarettes as they actually are. Also, cigarettes should reduce your boredom a tiny bit. They don't only reduce stress, but smokers also actually like to smoke and smoke when they are bored as well, I can assure you of that..

Having a memory system slowly picking away at certain skills would be pretty interesting. like having 3 or 5 levels of memory, like normal memory would be maybe 50 exp loss every day starting after 3 days of not doing that thing schizophrenic randomly forget certain skills for a certain amount of time and other symptoms maybe something in between because schizophrenia is a bit extreme forgetful 125% exp loss average memory (no trait) 100% exp loss good memory 75% exp loss hyperthymesia 25% exp loss the traits should be very costly to make them not god-tier just something you have to live with

New trait: Hypermetropia Type: Negative Mutually exclusive: Short-sighted, Eagle eyed Description: "Close objects appearing blurry, far objects appear normal." And wearing glasses removes the effect of hypermetropia (farsightedness) or myopia (nearsightedness), but over time they become dirty, broken (from zombies), etc.

The means to make it is there! If you disagree with me go ahead and say why, but we have Agoraphobia and Claustrophobia, so why not a couple of Disorders? it could be a fun game to have a character have his mood randomly fluctuate from the tiniest things, and you may say you can just take Short Tempered, but I don't really agree because that only makes it easier to become angry and unhappy, and if you would take this trait, it should cancel out the ability to take Short-Tempered or Patient. This game has alot of psychological-stuff planned so a couple of things like this would probably fit right in, imagine the difficulties one could have joining a survivor group with this, would make for a very interesting game! And if anyone finds this post offensive, i'm uhh...sorry, I didn't mean to offend and don't see how I did. And for you old-timers, i'm sorry if this was suggested before, really I am. Thanks for reading!